Relative Something

Today we are taking Asher to camp for a twelve-day live-in training experience where he will get time to socialize with other dogs and begin learning lessons wearing an e-collar. It is a new step toward improving Asher’s respect for our commands to him with the ultimate goal of allowing him to roam our property off-leash while obeying the confines of our property borders.

Last night we had a wonderful consultation session in Hudson that introduced Asher to one of the staff who works at the kennel where Asher will be “vacationing.”

Cyndie had contacted these trainers after Asher had received a ban from the doggy daycare place where we’d been taking him for playtime with other dogs. At the time, when the daycare reported Asher was “reactive” to two other dogs, we thought it was a worst outcome. Now, we see it as a good thing because it moved us to this next level of training with skilled professionals.

During yesterday evening’s ‘meet-n-greet,’ we were allowed to sit on the curb and let the trainer handle Asher while a colleague walked two different dogs nearby in a busy parking lot beside a busy street.

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Asher definitely took notice, but the trainer was able to reclaim his attention and continue walking without difficulty.

The next dog was bigger and the handler was playing rambunctiously with it and had her dog bark on command but Asher was nothing more than curious.

At the completion of their exercises, they returned with the verdict that they didn’t see Asher’s behavior as being “reactive.” They described it as being understandably curious.

When we told them the name of the facility that applied the term “reactive” to Asher’s scraps with two different dogs, their response was instantaneous that the level of training of staff at such a location was not of the highest quality. That helped us to give the upsetting news they reported about Asher’s behavior much less weight in our minds.

With this brief exercise with Asher, the trainer has a good idea about an itinerary she and the kennel owner/trainer will plan for the next week and a half at their facility with other dogs that will be on hand.

There are a lot of promising circumstances with our new trainers. The kennel is on the way to our lake place. The trainer we met last night lives very close to us in Ellsworth. She will be able to come to our property after Asher completes his training at the 40-acre kennel property and help us apply the things he learned up there at our home.

She also proposed the possibility of her picking Asher up and taking him to the kennel on future occasions to save us the drive since she would be going there frequently. That would be handy for us in times we weren’t otherwise on the way up to Hayward.

Both trainers last night felt very confident that Asher will be able to learn to respect our commands more reliably and to respect our property borders with more training and his natural maturing.

That speaks well to their confidence that we can be trained to be more effective dog handlers, even at our age.

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